Anyone ever done a cross country trip in a Rental before?
 

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Anyone ever done a cross country trip in a Rental before?


tell us about it..

What kind of car? how much you spend? How was it? (post pics too,lol)


I wanted to do LAX (or las vegas) to Atlanta, GA. but cant find a price less than $900 thru $1000.. (aprox 3600 thru 4000miles)



at that price, ill rather BUY a $10,000 - $12k car, and just sell the car when i get home,lol..

I did a cross country trip from Columbus, OH to San Francisco on a borrowed Honda VTX 1300 motorcycle one time.

That was a blast.

I did one once, in a rented Avis Pontiac Bonneville... Washington, DC to Seattle, Washington... September 13-15, 2001.

Three work colleagues and I were stuck in Washington during 9/11 and aftermath. We'd flown into DCA on the 9th or 10th on ATA and when DCA was shut down indefinitely, so was our route home. On the Wednesday night of that terrible week I rang Avis and inexplicably lucked into an incredible one-way deal, if I'd come up to BWI to collect the car... which I did, on a Thursday morning train. The airport was as close to an armed camp as I ever hope to see in this country, but Avis was terrific.

I drove back down to DC and collected my friends. We left Lafayette Park on Thursday afternoon around 300pm and got to the Fauntleroy ferry dock in West Seattle at 900am Saturday. Around 2800 miles in 45 hours flat, and we squeezed in a couple of restaurant meals too -- Friday lunch at an Applebee's in North Platte, Nebraska, and Friday dinner at some sort of seafood house north of Salt Lake City. I-90, I-80, and I-84 were rivers of Fords and Chevys and Pontiacs with bar codes on their rear windows... about every fifth car was full of grounded businesspeople driving home.

The tab was about $225 plus ten tanks of gas. By Thursday or Friday the car rental firms had cottoned to the opportunity and were starting to charge insane, holdup rates for one-way rentals, but we were, as I said, lucky to get in early.

This thread might do better in the Other category, as it's not unique to any one particular company. Most of the corporate ones do it, with differences in locations, cars, and of course price.

Last year I did I-80 from San Francisco to NY with a Hertz Ford Escape. I heard some people did something similar with National. I saw an Avis Nissan Versa with NY plates parked next to me in central NE at a fuel stop. Dollar seems to be the most expensive for cross country one-ways, with a typical unbundled drop charge of $1,200.

I once did a trip which started in San Francisco-Los Angelas-Las Vegas-Grand Canyon-Dallas-New Orleans-Tallahasse-Atlanta-Chicago-Denver-San Francisco.

The Chicago-San Franciscio portion I pretty well drove non-stop and had 2-3 hours to spare before my flight.
I think the trip totaled about 7000 miles in 2 weeks.
I paid around $160 for the 2 week car rental.
The lowest price I paid for gas was in Georgia for around 80 cents a gallon .
The rental had about 4100 miles on it when I started and ended with around 11200. Well worth the cost of the rental. :D
Wonder if the rental company made any money renting to me.

A friend of mine with a bunch of her friends drove from Montreal to New Orleans and back in a week once in a rented minivan. The agent was NOT impressed when they came back with XXXX miles more on the clock....

what year was this? $160 for 2weeks?????

Hint: the car was a Hupmobile. :)

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I did my share of cross-country trips: One of which rented from Avis @ YYC airport, a cushy Buick LeSabre. Took it east on Hwy 1 all the way to YYZ, then down into the US to NYC, west to all the way to SAN, then up the coast to YVR, and then through the mountains back east to YYC. Pretty much circled the continent around the US and Canada. Got odd looks all around, esp in the eastern seaboard with Alberta tags driving down I-95. Great experience - I felt sorry for the 3800 V6 under the hood going that many miles without an oil change!

Why would the agent care, unless it's a station manager or one responsible for revenue generation?



My guess would be the mid 90's with gas at that price.

Guys - all great stories about cross country travel and I'm planning one similar to the one laid out by the original poster. However, I'm hitting a big roadblock

The cheapest I'm finding for a 2 month rental is about $2000 - any ideas to lower this cost?

Thanks

One-way or roundtrip? If one-way, from where to where? Which company?

Round trip - NJ to CA and back and also visiting some southern states on the way so not necessarily I-80W all the way

Thank you!

Well, to the rental company, that's not really a cross-country trip (as long as you make sure you have unlimited miles and no restrictions on how many states you can drive the car in; I've not seen the latter restrictions at Avis that I can remember, but I've seen them somewhere, probably Enterprise).

So your price quesiton is really about a 2-month rental, not a cross-country trip, right?

So what you seem to be getting is simply a $250ish weekly rate. Although that's not great, it's not necessarily that bad, depending on where the rental orgiinates. It's just that most people don't stretch it out to 2 months.

I think planned multi-month rentals at conventional car companies are rather rare. They don't tend to have monthly rates that I'm aware of (except again maybe Enterprise, since they do a lot of rent-while-your-car-is-repaired). And in fact htere tend to be penalties for multi-month rentals, like inability to earn points/miles/etc.

The suggestions would be similar to other home-base rental suggestions, starting with have you compared prices with the rental starting at all possible local airport locations? (Rentals tend to be cheaper at airports, even if it may be more convenient to use a non-airport location near you. And some airports are more competitive than others. For a two month rental, it could pay off to start off somewhere where you have to pay a bit to get there and back, but still save money net.)

Avis has a monthly rate that is different from 4x weekly. A friend of mine recently picked up a compact (Focus SEL w/14k; Sirius is deactivated, though) that's going to end up at $550 after the monthly coupon on the website for 31 days. Taking it for 28 or less would have been weekly x4, which at the moment is running around $700 here.

What really kills you on long rentals are the per day fees that many locations charge.